When Worcester Emergency Management Director David W. Clemons received an email Friday from the state asking him to head to Nassau County, N.Y., with three other communications and public safety specialists from Massachusetts, he said he was relieved he would be able to help.

Mr. Clemons spent hours in Worcester’s emergency operations center during Superstorm Sandy, watching helplessly as areas along the Eastern Seaboard were slammed by the hurricane.

Yesterday, he received the official word from the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency that he and three others from Massachusetts were going to the center of emergency operations in Nassau County.

“I’m excited to help out,” he said. “We were in the emergency operations center for the city when it was happening monitoring any impacts on the city and looking at the Eastern Seaboard. We knew that New York and New Jersey would get hit much harder. We were watching the news and all the broadcasts on TV and the trouble they were going through. Anything communications-related requires power and right now, Long Island and Staten Island are lacking that. Our goal is to go down and help out.”

Mr. Clemons, who is also in charge of emergency communications for the city, will join Worcester Fire Department Lt. Mark Cady, Holden state Trooper John Ruggeiro and Steve M. Staffier, statewide interoperability coordinator for MEMA, leaving by car at 2 p.m. today to assist with restoration of radio and phone systems and public safety infrastructure, and should return at the end of the week.

“Even in our operations center, we discussed, if that was us, how would we handle it,” Mr. Clemons said. “Hopefully, those discussions will be put into practice when we go down there.”

One thing the storm has reinforced, he said, is that no matter how prepared a community is, with this type of devastation, they will need outside help.

“What strikes me the most is in the New York area with all the resources that they have and all the planning that was done after Sept. 11, what strikes me is that no area in the country can respond to these types of incidents without outside help,” he said. “They can plan for surviving in the short-term, but with all the preplanning and preparation that was done, they were still devastated by a hurricane. As a country, in any area with this amount of devastation, we’ll need outside help and we’re going to have to plan for that because this level of devastation is difficult to plan for.”

He said he doesn’t feel officials in New Jersey and New York underestimated the potential impact.

“It was the nature of the storm itself,” he said. “It definitely made a bigger impact on utilities and infrastructure-wise than we would have imagined in that area. In New England, our infrastructure is older and more vulnerable given the trees and foliage. We wouldn’t have anticipated it in that area, but the size of the storm did disrupt services.”

If Sandy did not turn west when it did, the potential devastation to Cape Cod, Connecticut and Rhode Island’s coastline would have been immense, he said.

“We always knew it was predicted to turn left at some point, as it came up the Eastern Seaboard,” he said. “The benefit to us is it hit the New Jersey coast as predicted and our plans were appropriate. I think we would have been OK in Central Massachusetts as we saw inland in New York and New Jersey with the destruction and damage less and less further from the coast, but if the storm didn’t take a left-hand turn, we would have seen on the Cape Cod, Connecticut and Rhode Island coastline as great an impact, if not more.”

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